Youth With A Mission (YWAM) has been globally championing children and families as central participants in the Great Commission for more than forty years. We believe passionately in the capacity of children and youth to know God intimately and walk in a living relationship with Him, which can eternally impact those around them. In short, kids are not only a key target group for missions but also key players in reaching the world for Jesus!

Most everyone wants to travel the world, right? There's something adventurous buried deep within our DNA. We want to explore and experience, touch and taste, and overwhelm our senses with the diversity of life on this amazing planet God has made. So we scrimp and save until we have enough for airfare then stuff a backpack and head off into the unknown.

Christmas memorialises the greatest mission-trip of all time. This was a long-term assignment, a to-the-death calling, an irrevocable vocation. From beginning to end, Christmas is about God's mission to redeem His dying people, and He chose the most extraordinary strategy imaginable to accomplish this: becoming "God Incarnate."

It’s a sweltering humid day as we pull up in the street amid piles of rubble. The homeowners, an older Hispanic couple, approach us with shy friendly smiles and greet us in their best faltering English. Their front door sits wide open, inviting us to enter their North-East Houston home.

We pulled our rental car into the parking lot of this sleepy property in the rolling green hills of rural New Zealand. My four kids and I tumbled out with our pile of suitcases and looked around. It was 2013, and we had arrived to begin a Family Discipleship Training School (DTS), our first step into the big wide world of missions.